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Program Analysis, Evaluation Office Implements New Approach

WASHINGTON, July 19, 2002  The Defense Department's Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation will implement a new capabilities-based approach to the program and budget process.

Stephen A. Cambone, the new director of the office, said the mission of the organization is to advise the defense leadership on the relationship of defense programs and budgets to U.S. defense objectives, projected threats, allied contributions, estimated costs and resource constraints.

At an afternoon news briefing at the Pentagon, Cambone gave an overview of the office's roles and responsibilities. He said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had asked him to "create the connective tissue between what we have done over the last year in defining strategy guidance, for the service components and the department as a whole, and connect that to programs. Programs then get translated into budget."

The comptroller develops the budget, Cambone said, but the program analysis and evaluation office will provide advice, along with the comptroller, to the secretary and other senior defense officials. They will also provide "a range of choices that they could make in trying to provide the capabilities that we are going to need for the coming decades," he added.

Cambone said he's been given the clear mission to ensure there are close ties between the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff and the services. The close ties will allow everyone involved in making budgetary decisions the opportunity to give their views on the strategic implications of the choices and lend their advice to the secretary. The secretary, in turn, can give the best advice to the president.

The office will focus on three areas. The first is capabilities. "The Quadrennial Defense Review and the Defense Planning Guidance has stressed again and again and again the need for a capabilities-based approach to our force capabilities," Cambone said.

Second, is jointness. "We are looking to focus first and foremost on the contribution that any given program or platform is going to make to joint operations," he said.

Third, is strategic choices. Cambone said he hopes to "avoid the typical approach which is a decision made program by program, platform by platform, without any relationship made between those choices or between what we need to meet our near-term needs, particularly the ongoing war, and what we need to do to prepare for the future."

In preparing for the future, he said, defense officials are thinking through the question, 'What would you like to have in 2015?' "Are the capabilities designed in the early '80s or the early '90s the systems that you're going to want to have moving into the next 20 or 30 years?" he asked. "Do we need to think about another way to go?

"What we decide to build over the next few years," Cambone said, "are going to be with us probably for as many as 50 years."

The office will use the goals outlined in the QDR as measurements in their evaluation of various programs "as they relate to joint operations and to the capabilities they'll provide to meet the kind of environment we're moving into," he said.

Over the next month, he noted, the office will sketch a framework for the relationships within the strategic, joint and capabilities contexts. In September, they'll discuss the range of choices and how many different ways one can approach acquiring the capabilities needed. In October, senior defense officials will begin to decide on their choices, which will then roll into the development of the budget.

The budget is to be completed in December to go to the Office of Management and Budget as the secretary's recommendation to the president.

Defense officials announced earlier in the day that the defense secretary has appointed Navy Rear Adm. Stanley R. Szemborski to serve as deputy director of the office. He left his position as deputy director for resources and requirements on the Joint Staff. His broad experience will help evaluate programs in a strategic context and from a joint perspective, defense officials said.